How the second generation owner of a spicy crab restaurant turned to soft shell crab farming with the help of AI technology
Like many of his peers, Liu Wai-man, the second generation owner of Hee Kee Fried Crab, one of Hong Kong's most popular seafood restaurants for tourists, struggled through the 2019 social unrest and three years of Covid-19 controls.
After closing two of his three restaurants, leaving the 57 year-old flagship eatery in Causeway Bay open for business, Liu believes the business model for operating a crab cuisine restaurant "is not sustainable". A surge in supply costs has been a double whammy.
So he switched gears. In 2021, he co-founded the AI Farming Company (Hong Kong) with partners Hao Xiaotian and Legislative Council member Johnny Ng Kit-chong, aiming to use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to provide indoor farming solutions to nurture soft shell crabs.
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In the same year, the company joined the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks' incubation programme.
"Soft shell crab is a commonly seen ingredient used in Chinese, Japanese cuisines, and the co-fusion menu required in many premium restaurants. Unfortunately, the productivity of the soft shell crab industry is very low due to a low survival rate in the raising process," said Liu in an interview with the South China Morning Post.
Soft shell crabs are crabs that are going through the process of moulting, when they shed and exit their old shell. "They are soft for about four hours. Then their shell starts to turn hard again," said Liu.
"We use AI to monitor crab health through the whole life cycle. Our software can automatically detect moulting crabs and harvest them at the best time"
"We use Huawei ModelArts as a tool to build our AI image recognition model to detect the crabs' health conditions," he said.
The software also monitors important statistics like death rate, time to moult, and other health attributes of the crabs.
"The size of our soft shell crabs are bigger and stronger, but the production costs are lower as the data creates effective models that enable massive reductions in labour and increased efficiency in output," Liu said.
Farming of soft shell crabs has been practised for some time now in a number of Asian countries such as Malaysia and Thailand, but Liu believes his company is the first of its kind in Hong Kong.
The company has "farmed" two rounds of soft shell crabs and is ready to raise capital investment for mass production, according to partner Hao, a PhD in computer science and engineering, who graduated from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Hao Xiaotian (left) and Liu Wai-man of AI Farming Company, with a soft shell crab at Hee Kee Fried Crab Restaurant. Photo: SCMP/ K. Y. Cheng alt=Hao Xiaotian (left) and Liu Wai-man of AI Farming Company, with a soft shell crab at Hee Kee Fried Crab Restaurant. Photo: SCMP/ K. Y. Cheng>
For start-ups like AI Farming, scaling into mass production is a challenge, Albert Wong Hak-keung, chief executive of Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks, said in a previous interview with the Post.
Liu said the company is considering expanding its production facility in the tech park, as well as other possibilities in mainland Chinese cities.
In future, the company can cooperate with farmers to nurture more soft shell crabs, according to Liu.
"With our expertise in crab cuisines, we can operate premium restaurant chains in Hong Kong and Asia, specialising in quality soft shell crab dishes," he said.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
